Kindlehill – Buran Nalgarra

We asked, What ecological services to the community of life does/could our School provide, if we mimic or take inspiration from the swamp elder at Wentworth Falls Lake?

Eco-systems Thinking and specifically, Biomimicry have been the inspiration for a recent Senior School project.

The local hanging swamp at Wentworth Falls Lake was imagined as a biological elder and our initial investigation was into how the swamp functions in providing ecological services to its community of life. We then used this as a model to understand how our School was functioning from an ecological services perspective. This work was informed by Biomimicry – where in this case, we looked for design elements that align with how a local ecosystem functions and solves problems.

With Janine Benyus we asked, What would nature do here? Why?

What wouldn’t nature do here? Why not?

Taking an Audit

In conducting an audit of energy we appreciated the abundance of the sun and solar energy for a business that operates during daytime hours. Regarding water, we looked at what we were doing and could do better, in storing and filtering water (tanks, tiered plantings, rain garden). We looked at how we could turn our waste into resource (compost, biogas, repurposing), how to protect and extend habitat, and to improve resilience through diversity.

From the audit, we came up with some interesting projects including creating a sustainable outdoor kitchen for high school using biogas and rocket stoves. Can we build it? If we can imagine it, we can.

In reflecting on what was important about inquiring through a biomimicry lens, we agreed that it embodied/embedded our School environment in connection with its adjacent elder, the hanging swamp.

School is a process, a series of interconnecting and ever changing relationships, rather than a fixed idea or object. At its core, it can respect and serve the community of life of which it is a part right down to its design, build and grow.

To read other posts on the Kindlehill blog, go here: Home | Kindlehill Senior School Blog

Barbara @The Enlivenment Network

Kindlehill School is one of our Network Partners. This independent school, providing education from K to Year 12 is embedded in our Blue Mountains community, which has a significant cultural ethos of Caring for Country, living as we do in the middle of the Blue Mountains National Park, which is one of six neighbouring national parks that make up the Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.

While we understand our kids needs to learn the basics: literacy, maths, critical thinking and civics, we also understand that education sits at the crossroads of a global challenge to our taken- for-granted assumptions about modernity’s interpretation of Progress and Prosperity as being about competitive individualism—whether applied to the individual person, the individual nuclear family, the individual community, the individual polity (local government, state or nation), or the individual corporation or small business. As a human society, we have pursued these ideas at the expense of our understanding of the importance of what Indigenous scholars call the relationist ethos that underpins First Nations knowledge systems.

Their relationist ethos lies at the heart of their enduring commitment to Caring for Country as LAW, which has been conveyed across millennia through LORE—expressed through stories, the visual arts, performance, song, and ceremony held in the ancient songlines of Australia.

We non-Indigenous Australians, whether descendants of the settler colonialists of British or Irish heritage, or more recent immigrants from all over the world in today’s multicultural Australia, are now being called to relinquish our competitive extractivist ethos and adopt this relationist ethos, as a way of transforming modern culture towards an enlivenment worldview. A worldview that enables us to escape our existential alienation from our fellow Earthlings, and recognise ourselves as part of Earth’s family, not its overlord.

Kindlehill School, through their Buran Nalgarra program are showing ways to put this goal into daily practice through the way we teach our kids—away from the alienation of abstraction to the embeddedness of place-based learning.

Such a contrast to the culture wars around ‘woke’ being waged by the last bastions of the life-denying competitive extractivism of the old-style neoliberal capitalism, still being pursued by both the Liberal and National Parties in Australia, and their business backers.

As mainstream media gives way to podcasts, TikTok, and so-called ‘influencers’, it is up to us in the community to shape a new conversation about the way out of the multi-pronged polycrisis engulfing our world. We cannot simply tune out and look away, searching for entertaining distraction. Instead we must search for a new, more life affirming and viable story based on a relationist ethos, by which to chart our future path through the looming dangers of cognitive capitalism.